The Host with the Most?

[steepholm]

A few posts ago I was maundering on about the rain falling on just and unjust alike, and whether that saying would have had the same connotations in the relatively arid climate where it was coined as it now carries in my own soggier corner of the world. I suppose my next question is rather similar, though more doctrinally central: just how common was it to drink wine in first-century Palestine?

Clearly they had several skinfuls at the Cana wedding, and at the Last Supper too, but those were special occasions. Was it an everyday drink for your ordinary Joe? Or a luxury good? It makes a big difference to the significance of the Eucharist. If wine is the drinking equivalent of bread - the most staple of staples - then that gives it one kind of significance. But if it's seen as something special, that gives it another.

Even if wine flowed freely and cheaply in Jesus's particular time and place, that certainly hasn't always been the case in the cultures to which Christianity has been introduced. It must have been another story in beer-drinking countries such as Egypt and Germany, for example. The same goes for England, where wine was seen as a posh drink until very recent times. Telling an Anglo-Saxon peasant to drink wine in memory of Christ must have conveyed a very different message from telling a first-century Roman to do the same.

Christopher Marlowe is said to have joked that the Eucharist "would have bin much better being administred in a Tobacco pipe" - and after all, why not? One for the alternative historians, perhaps.

Comments

[kalypso]

As usual, my first instinct is to turn to Cruden's Complete Concordance to the Old & New Testament & Apocrypha: this is Cruden's page on wine, which includes a lengthy introduction before the also lengthy list of verses which mention wine (before we get on to wine-bibbers, wine-bottles, wine-cellars, wine-presses etc). If it's too small to read, I can send close-ups. But my conclusion from a quick glance is that wine would appear to be a staple in the Old Testament - the detail about it being forbidden to priests in the tabernacle suggests to me that the drinking of wine is common practice.

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

I think the concept of wine as a rarer good in at least the English and Welsh sections of these islands stems from the climate change of my very own 17th century. Up to then wine was being produced a good way north and rough wine at least would have been an everyday beverage for all but the very poorest, even if quality stuff was a gentry import. And this also overlooks fruit wines in their various forms.

You forget that Germany is and has been for centuries a major wine producing culture.

Interestingly, the Scottish tradition at the Eucharist is to serve a fortified wine such as port, although I don't know how old the tradition is- Scotland would never have been able to produce wine of its own.

Anti-whine poem to memorize by heart

[karinmollberg.livejournal.com]

http://www.poemhunter.com/best-poems/hilaire-belloc/heroic-poem-in-praise-of-wine/ Personally, I believe (as one should in this case; believe, I mean) it was served as both médicine and means of mystical communion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine Can't help loving having a symbol intus, either way and you can see its effects on Mollberg Speak that can only be described as savoury http://www.romantic-germany.info/Romantic-Rhine.4110.0.html http://www.germany.travel/en/towns-cities-culture/towns-cities/wuerzburg.html even when my mouth is very full!

[sovay]

I suppose my next question is rather similar, though more doctrinally central: just how common was it to drink wine in first-century Palestine?

The concept of kosher wine goes back to Biblical times, so my answer would be "very." Plus first-century Judaea is a Roman province and the Romans were serious about their viticulture, so it's not like only the local culture would have been receptive to the significance. I think of it as a drinking staple of most of the ancient world, obviously remembering the existence of beer. There are ancient Egyptian and Near Eastern vineyards, though, and red wine plays an important role in Egyptian ritual life. It's one of the standard provisions for the afterlife. The Phoenicians are incredibly influential in furthering the spread of wine not just as a traded commodity, but as a technology. [edit] tl;dr I think your ordinary Josephus might have considered the really good stuff a luxury good, but in terms of the ability to come home with a couple of asses' worth of plonk, there would have been lots to choose from.

[joyeuce]

I have a vague memory from back in my theology-student days, of being told that wine was common in first-century Palestine, and discussing the difference this made to one's conception of the Eucharist. Probably as part of my final-year liturgy module.

I wonder whether the relative rarity of wine contributed to the pre-Vatican II Roman Catholic tradition that only the priest received the Eucharist in both kinds. However, this has been illegal in the Church of England since the Sacrament Act of 1547, except in cases of grave emergency. (That was a contribution from my husband the church historian.)

My Nonconformist-mixed-with-Anglican background means that I have received the blood of Christ in the form of Communion wine (vile), non-alcoholic Communion wine (worse, and I once had to drink a full chalice of it), grape juice, Ribena (because the Communion steward was embarrassed to buy grape juice - ?), sherry, and Lindisfarne mead.

Here endeth the spill of random chunks of information!

[wellinghall.livejournal.com]

Two of the problems encountered by the Christian Greenland Norse were the need to hunt and export walrus &c to trade for items they couldn't make themselves, including communion wine; and the increasing isolation from the Christian community in Europe, with a lack of ships bringing them, among other things, bishops and wine.

[rinue.livejournal.com]

It's my understanding that wine was served at basically every meal, as was bread, so saying "think of me every time you eat and drink these" meant "think of me every day, maybe every meal, because I am always present." My mom has therefore suggested we should change the present day eucharist from wine to coffee.

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

Imagine a Northern Eucharist! Whisky and oatcake?

Nine

[sue-bursztynski.livejournal.com]

In addition to all the above, wine is a normal part of Jewish ritual. You certainly drink it every Friday as part of the Sabbath meal and have a blessing over "the fruit of the vine" and as part of every other celebration. Why wouldn't you have some every day?

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I know the Bible pretty well and I don't think anyone ever drinks anything except wine, milk and water. The NT is full of viniculture imagery. "I am the true vine" "old wine in new wineskins" etc. No-one during my theological training ever suggested that wine was ever anything but an everyday beverage.